Education
For your information, here is a question.
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 48/49). The question is:
Why should the sending or receiving of a telegram seem more dramatic than the ringing of a telephone?
Me (August, 2010, age 58). The sending or receiving of what?
Anyone who has sent or received a telegram can attest to the truth of McLuhan’s observation.
Unfortunately, many of the readers of this blog may find the truth of McLuhan’s observation difficult to grasp because they have never sent or received a telegram. It is also possible that they have never heard a telephone ring dramatically. Which raises the question: What is today’s dramatic equivalent of the telegram? I suspect that the answer is: there isn’t one. Which raises another question for your information: Is the history of media impossible?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989, p. 150.
How to set an exam.
Marshall McLuhan (1969, age 57). Are you ready?
At the beginning of this seminar on communications I said that you were to choose 3 books out the 30 on the reading list and that they will be the subject of your final exam. No doubt you have been wondering what form this exam will take. Wonder no more. It’s time to sit and deliver. Have you got a pencil and paper? Very good, you will have thirty minutes. Write down three questions on each of the books you have read.
Me (July, 2010, age 58). A brilliant solution
Fred Thompson, who was a student of McLuhan’s at Toronto in the year after he returned from Fordham in the academic year 1968/69, talks about this exam in his contributions to the books Who Was Marshall McLuhan and Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message.
Certainly, McLuhan chose a brilliantly eccentric and efficient way to set an exam. A more direct approach would certainly have required a much longer exam with questions on each of the 30 books on the reading list. Almost certainly the questions the students’ came up with revealed much about their understanding of the books they had read and the form of the exam sends the clear message that he believes the questions are more important than the answers. But, it is doubtful if a university professor today would be allowed to set such an exam either by their department or their students.
As a test of your understanding of Marshall McLuhan and his work come up with three questions about him. Here are mine:
(1) What did he mean by “the medium is the message?”
(2) What can we learn about McLuhan from the portrait Wyndham Lewis drew of him?
(3) “What if he’s right?”
Now, what do you think? Are the questions more important than the answers?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan, 1994, pp. 178.
George Sanderson and Frank Mcdonald, eds., Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message, 1989, p. 135.
How much TV did Marshall McLuhan watch?
Marshall McLuhan (Summer 1952, age 41). A delightful chap!
This afternoon Hugh Kenner who is one of my graduate students brought around a friend of his, Fred Rainsbury, to chat in the garden of my house on St. Mary Street. Rainsbury is writing a Ph. D. thesis on The Irony of Objectivity in the New Criticism. I suggested he pay special attention to analogy, after all what’s metaphor?
Me (July, 2010, age 58). Apparently, more and more
According to Fred Rainsbury, who knew McLuhan in the early 1950s as a student, and went on to become Supervisor of Children’s Programming of Radio and Television at the CBC, “Marshall watched little television.”
Apparently over time McLuhan came to watch television more and more. In the mid 1970s McLuhan said in an interview that he had no time to listen to radio, no affection for movies anymore, but he did “see a good deal of television.” A remarkable admission from the man who is said to have pleaded with his children not to let his grandchildren watch too much TV and suggested the government limit the population’s access to TV. Which leads me to wonder how worried McLuhan actually was about the effects of TV? Did he change his mind? Did he believe himself to be immune? Was he purposely placing himself at risk in the pursuit of his research?
How much TV do you watch? Are you at all concerned about the effects of TV?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan, 1994, pp. 207 and 239.
I just don’t understand.
Marshall McLuhan (1960, age 49). Try the Coleridge method.
People can be a great mystery. Why do they think what they think? Or do what they do? The key is to understand them. But how? As I have often told my son Eric the Coleridge method (see his Biographia Litteraria) is most efficient. To find out what someone knows start with what they don’t know and work from there.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). OK, let’s try it.
Eric McLuhan notes that “Going the other way, it can take you as long (or nearly) to learn a man’s knowledge as it took him. Life is too short!”
What does this method tell us about Marshall McLuhan? There are two things McLuhan often professed ignorance of: small talk and numbers. What do these areas of ignorance tell us about what McLuhan knew? The absence of small talk implies the presence of big talk, suggesting that McLuhan was comfortable in the world of abstractions. The blank in numbers suggests, perhaps, that McLuhan’s explorations in understanding media were qualitative rather than quantitative. That is when he said TV had changed the world he was not saying it had changed a great deal because of TV. He was simply saying it had changed. He implied that it may have changed a great deal, but he had no way of telling how much.
What do you think? Is the Coleridge method helpful in understanding McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 1994, p. 242.
Working with others.
Marshall McLuhan (October 8, 1966, age 55). What a day!
I spent the day with George Leonard, who is a Senior Editor at Look Magazine. We talked without interruption from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. about the future of education. Quite frankly education isn’t what it used to be since the coming of TV. George is going to write up our conversation and the article will appear in Look. I can’t wait to see the expression on the face of the Dean of Graduate Studies when I show him my latest publication. He’ll be apoplectic.
Me (July, 2010, age 57) Which raises questions
“The Future of Education: The Class of 1989,” appeared in Look (February 21, 1967) as an article jointly written by Marshall McLuhan and George B. Leonard. But, as Leonard explains in his memoir, “Jamming with McLuhan, 1967,” McLuhan had nothing to do with the writing of it. Leonard says that he enjoyed the intellectual experience of working with McLuhan. But after writing only one other article – “The Future of Sex” – Leonard decided to end the partnership. In short, Leonard thought he wasn’t getting the credit he deserved. He was doing the hard work of writing and a good deal of the thinking, but readers were assuming the ideas were all McLuhan’s.
Are unequal partnerships of this type destined to fail? How much of the writing of the later McLuhan – particularly in his co-authored work – is actually McLuhan?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan? 1994, pp. 227-230.
Where do you get your information?
Marshall McLuhan (Fall 1953, age 42). Books!
“Marshall, must you spread your books throughout the house?”
“No, Corinne, but it serves me to do so. It reminds me of what I have read. Also I like to pick a book up and dip into it every now and again to add to and refresh my memory. Having them about me this way is a great help.”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). Books!
While McLuhan enjoyed talking to people, Philip Marchand says he got most of his information from books. On average, says Marchand, McLuhan read 35 books a week, which seems like a lot, even for a university professor. I get most of my ideas for this blog from books, but not exclusively from books. On average, though, I cannot say I read more than two books a week. (May be – like McLuhan – I should skim more.)
Where do you get your information? How many books do you read in a week?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989 p. 179.
Marshall McLuhan: Filmmaker.
Marshall McLuhan (1970, age 68/69). Let’s make a movie!
I have just spent a very productive day with Jane Jacobs. We have written a script for a movie, “A Burning Would.” (You will of course recognize the reference to Finnegans Wake, “A burning would has come to dance inane.”) If all works out this film will either be the final word on the nature of film or stop the Spadina Expressway dead in its tracks.
Me (June 2010, age 57) Lessons?
Jane Jacobs describes the chaotic and exhilarating day she spent with McLuhan writing a film script in Who was Marshall McLuhan. The word “script” is an exaggeration. Here’s how the day went: he persuaded her to give it a try, they talked about ideas, McLuhan’s secretary, Margaret Stewart took notes, and typed them up, and McLuhan made arrangements to meet with the filmmaker David Mackay to discuss the “script.” Jacobs describes the resulting “script” as “garbled and unreadable” but also as “dazzling sparks and fragments.”
Remarkably the film (12 minutes long) was made [and even more remarkably doesn’t seem to be posted on YouTube]. Jacobs says that the film was “good” but “the final product bore no relationship at all to our original script.”
Perhaps, the major lessons to be learned from this film are:
Don’t be afraid to try new things (neither Jacobs nor McLuhan had ever tried to write a script before.)
Get yourself good partners.
Don’t be afraid to fail.
What new things are you doing?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Who Was Marshall McLuhan. Edited by Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, 1995, pp. 101-102.
For other inspiration see Julien Smith’s In over your head.
And thanks to Michael Edmunds for this interview of McLuhan on his plans for filmmaking originally published in Take One in the 1970s – Marshall McLuhan makes a movie.